Month: October 2016

Trends emerge, grab attention, grow big and then after a short or long run spanning over few months to years they vanish from the scene. When it comes to graphic design we have seen too many trends appearing in the course of few years with varying degree of success and lasting influence on the web and digital apps. In the catwalk of graphic design trends, we have seen some of the most enduring and continuously evolving ones like the Flat design and also some short-lived design trends like the Skeumorphic design.

We are almost at the end of 2016 and several graphic design trends matured from their earlier avatar offering a clear idea of the trends that are going to rock the web and other digital interfaces in the months to come. Here we have picked 10 graphic design trends that will continues to rock the web.

Material is the new flat

The flat design thanks to its clean, clutter-free, colorful look, prominent typeface, use of white space and delicate use gradients has taken over the web and mobile apps for few years. Offering minimalist approach with an optimum focus on readability and usefulness, the Flat design has achieved the phenomenal popularity that no other design trends achieved so far. It is also the most enduring trend surpassing a massive transformation through an array of visual treatments. It was introduced by Microsoft’s Zune mp3 player in 2006 followed by a refreshed take by Apple’s iOS 7 in 2013 and it has been given a deeper twist by Google with Material design in 2014.

Material design with its seemingly flat look is further characterized by more deliberate color choices, full blown imagery, larger visual typeface, and a lot of negative space around content allowing a bold look and feel.

Material design is rightly being called as “Flat 2.0” as it looks like an updated and fine-tuned version of the flat design. The erstwhile flat design has been upgraded with the use of light and shadow, weight and depth and background movement.

Although it holds all the simple, clutter free and usability-optimized attributes of Flat design, it offers a deeper sense of realism previously missing with the Flat design.

Technically speaking, Material design has been created for optimum usability and loading speed.

Bold, stylish, multiple typefaces

Bold and stylish typeface as a graphic design element have been around for quite some time since it has been extensively incorporated by the proponents of Flat design. Now together with their boldness and style designers are more inclined to add more variety to their look and feel. So, an increasing number of interfaces are coming up with multiple, varied typefaces. Several complementing font types at different sizes and styles are being used to create better visual hierarchy and to optimize readability. Experiment with typefaces will continue and fonts will play a key role in new design innovations.

Use of negative Space

Negative or blank space as an essential part of graphic design is continuing to grow in importance as spaces around text helps to enhance readability to a great extent. But apart from their well-appreciated role in augmenting the prominence and clarity of contents they can also be utilized to invoke a deeper or double meaning when used appropriately with other design elements. Moreover, use of blank space allows a minimalist, stripped-down and elegant look and feel.

Hand-drawn illustrations

Care-free, hand drawn illustrations may look childish but for incorporating amusing elements in serious design layout they are simply irreplaceable. Doodles being popularized by Google are now being widely used by a lot of professional services, web interfaces, and apps. They can easily incorporate a very playful and warm human feel. Hand drawn illustrations with sketchy lines, sharp brushstrokes and subtle use of colors are creating crisp and clean interfaces that grab attention and make an enduring brand statement.

Cinemagraph

Cinemagraph is the new kid in the block reserved for innovative graphic design. A little flickering movement in the background images just has enough to grab attention and impress us to stay on the page. This hybrid design encapsulating both the elements of motion and still is increasingly becoming popular across web interfaces.

Card layouts

Card-like modular layouts had a very successful run for some years. It has been adopted by a vast majority of the big brands for websites and apps. This design after being widely introduced by Microsoft in its path-breaking Windows 8 design went on to take over the websites and mobile apps of an array of companies. Card or grid based layout can be instrumental in adding variety, diversity, and flexibility in the design layout.

Geometric design

The trend of using geomagnetic shapes is hip now. They offer a textured background effect with layers. Originally conceived as packaging design it has been taken by websites and mobile apps to allow prominence to the typeface with a textured backdrop in behind. Experiments on geometric design will continue with color schemes, contrast, and depth.

Minimalistic design

With the widespread design focus on readability and usability, the minimalist design took over the web and app design. In complete contrast to the dazzling, flamboyant and sometimes hippie design of the 1980s, minimalist, purposively focused and simple design styles have now become more popular. To add to the attractive look and feel over minimalist design abstract artworks and geometric forms are also being used by many websites.

Print-inspired design

The inspiration from the print world for some time is shaping web design. The pre-digital printing elements like color slabs, rich textures, misprint or overprint effects, etc. are being incorporated into digital interfaces for a lively, material look.

Warm colors

Colors continue to play a pivotal role in web design. Vibrant warm colors besides helping hierarchical design are also boosting clarity and usability of web interfaces. Emotional use of colors keeping sync with the website niche, focus area and target audience is now critical element for any design endeavor. Bright colors from pastel shades, neon, and saturated colors are being more preferred for the hip, eye candy looks and feels they offer.

If you’re looking at launching an e-commerce website, you have probably heard of Magento. This program is one option for those looking to create a website from which to sell their products. It provides many different built-in features, including inventory management databases, shopping carts, and other methods of customising your online store. There are a number of different features built-in to Magento that make it very user-friendly and very flexible.

Extreme Customisation

Magento makes use of Object-Oriented Programming to allow you to design your own websites that fit your specific needs. You can take various Magento extensions and applications and modify them to provide the solutions to your needs. All of the coding of the Community Edition of the e-commerce platform is open source, so experts can modify any part of the source code. If the feature you want doesn’t exist, a professional web design company can create it for you.

A Community of Help

Because Magento is open source, you don’t have to go to one company for support. Instead, you have an entire community standing by to help with issues or to provide solutions. This helps to ensure that the Magento platform is always protected from viruses and other security issues.

It Scales

Unlike some e-commerce options, Magento is ready to grow with your business. You can begin using it as a platform for your small business, but as you grow, it can expand to handle all of your needs. If you’re working with a good business that specialises in Magento web design in Melbourne, you’ll never have to worry about migrating to a new system. Your partner web design team can continue to expand your e-commerce site in Magento as needed.

It Was Designed Especially for e-Commerce

Some businesses try to use other content management systems for their e-commerce sites, because they are already using those systems for their websites and blogs. However, these other systems weren’t necessarily built from the ground up for e-commerce. Many had e-commerce functionality added to them later. That’s not the case with Magento. It was designed as an e-commerce platform, so it includes everything needed to function as one. There’s no need for any additional features or extensions.

Part of this design includes integration with various payment gateways, banks, and other third-party services that you may need to use to operate your e-commerce business smoothly. Magento is designed to seamlessly integrate with a number of these other platforms with no issues.

SEO

No e-commerce site is complete without being optimised for search engines. Your web design team will be able to implement a strong SEO marketing campaign using Magento, because it’s already prepared for SEO. The platform include a number of SEO features designed to make it easy to make your e-commerce site visible to search engines. Meta tags, friendly URLS, layered navigation, sitemaps, and more are all included in the basic Magento package. If you don’t find an SEO feature you need, your web design partners can simply create it thanks to the open source code.

Setting up a business isn’t as hard as it used to be, but there are still pitfalls, and with so many variables, the risk of failure is always there. Markets are highly competitive, and if you are to take a slice of the pie, it will be at the cost of someone else. Here is a list of essential things that will help your business become a sustainable player in the world of e-commerce.

Create the Right Website – This is critical, as very business nowadays relies heavily on their web presence, and with a team of in-house designers, your digital marketing company will take care of all things IT. If you are in the UK, and are about to take the first step towards starting your own business, there are web design services near London that can assist in all aspects of web design and creation.

Have the Right Marketing Plan – Without it, your business will have no direction, and the best people to talk to are a reputable digital marketing agency, who can create the ideal marketing plan to launch your products or services on the World Wide Web. Social media plays an important role in modern advertising, and with so many consumers using these platforms to order products, it makes sense to create a strong presence.

Have Adequate Funding – This is the major reason why a new business folds, so make sure you have covered everything in the start-up expenses, and allow an emergency fund to cover any eventuality. You might be able to get a line of credit from your main suppliers, which will certainly help you to get started, but factor in at least 6 months without any income, just to be on the safe side.

Take Out Adequate Insurance – One can never be sure about anything, especially in the uncertain world we live in, and by taking out public liability insurance, you are covered should you cause any injury or damage to a third party’s property. If you have any employees, you need to take out employer’s liability insurance, and that covers any claims made by your workers. All vehicles should be insured, as should the business premises, along with any stock or assets within.

Have a Workable Business Plan – This will be your guide to success, and it should include forecasts and projections over the first 5 years. The plan should also explain your marketing strategy and expected outcomes, along with annual reachable targets, for each of the first 5 years of trading. The business plan can be changed if that is deemed necessary, otherwise it should be followed, and with the right actions, your company will soon establish itself as a major player.

Starting any business has an element of risk attached, but with careful planning, and the right partners, you can go all the way. Make sure you enlist the help of a good digital marketing company, and they will guide you to sustainable growth.

Responsive web design (RWD) has already swept the web in past few years and still, websites are busy fine-tuning it further. But let us begin with the basics. What does responsive design signify? Well, responsive design ensures a homogeneous web experience irrespective of the browser or the type of device is in use. Designers achieve this by using flexible images, fluid grids and easily scalable design layouts. All these and many more aspects just cannot be learned better from textbooks but only from personal experience and the experience of other designers. Well, here we are going to introduce 10 such responsive web design tips learned from the experience.

1. A Mobile First Approach

The majority of browsers are now in mobile and a vast majority of mobile browsers exclusively use mobile devices to access the web. Naturally, a mobile first approach is inevitable. You need to make your design excel first in the small space and then scale to the desktop screen. This approach will make the design better equipped to address a variety of screen sizes. Mobile media engagement now stands at 62% of total time spent on digital media while the desktop engagement stands only at 38%. A majority of the desktop users belong to B2B niche. So, if your business needs to remain accessible to the majority of users, a mobile first approach is inevitable.

2. Using Fluid Grids

By using fluid grids the designers can enjoy the better capacity to manipulate diverse parameters beyond the traditional design layouts. Without layout designing with fixed pixels fluid grid will allow you perfecting the pixel counts as per the proportion of the screen in hand. This helps in molding the design to different screen sizes easily without really compromising on the visual quality. Moreover, the fluid design allows dividing the target page elements as per context to allow every on-page element the right page portion it deserves.

3. Lazy loading

This is one of the most commonly discussed things when it comes to responsive design. Page loading speed is important to keep your users and minimize the bounce rate. It is also important to have a better search engine ranking just on account of better performance score. Responsive design with flexible images and scalable attributes cater to different devices in a befitting way and thus help to avoid slow loading speed. Actually, a vast majority of responsive sites just load in less than 10 seconds.

How can you ensure optimum page speed? Well, there are various aspects to it. Besides optimizing images, there is lazy loading that can make your contents load faster. Lazy loading ensures loading contents that are being searched for and prevents loading the whole site or page at one go. This helps faster loading.

4. Optimizing Images for Mobile Devices

Large images besides slowing down the page loading offer a lot of complexities concerning resolution. To prevent this you need to optimize these images through compression. The compressed images besides maintaining higher resolution and image quality help to decrease the byte size. This also helps to reduce the load on customers data usage while not compromising with the visual output.

5. Addressing user context

With the proliferation of mobile devices across all nooks and corners of life user behavior remains highly unpredictable. From locations to user scenarios to user preferences in particular situations, all these aspects are crucial for apps to offer relevant use. Well, these elements together dubbed as user context are keys to mobile marketing and app behavior. Without addressing user context any app risks being avoided. From a design perspective, responsive design helps to address user contexts as per location, time of the day and particular user cases. Thanks to advanced device level sensors and location input now designers can easily incorporate contextual elements in their design.

6. Stripped-off, brief and visually optimized content

Most mobile users just prefer to scan a document instead of reading it thoroughly. Mobile users browsing on the go or beside other engagement are less prone for attentive reading than their desktop counterparts. This smaller attention span of mobile users demands to serve them with brief, very relevant contents optimized visually for quick on-the-go reading. Moreover, you should avoid making your content subject to too much scrolling action as most users stick to mainly above-the-fold content.

7. Size is crucial for links and CTA

When it comes to mobile size is not just crucial for images but for almost everything. Every clickable area including the CTA buttons and the on-page links should be sized for the mobile accessibility. 44px x 44px is the ideal dimension for our finger-taps to touch over a target link and anything smaller than this risks being avoided by the users. Besides the size, the links and CTA buttons should have enough space inter between to allow ease of navigation and click-through action.

8. Use JQuery

JQeuery has already been dubbed as the secret weapon for creating a robust responsively designed website. Thanks to this tool the web designers can make use of various plug-ins that boosts responsiveness and adaptability of the design as per user contexts and devices. There are various helpful JQuery plugins for a responsive design like Supersized, FitVids, FitText, Elastislide, etc.

9. Using templates

Templates are still the best friends of designers to create the responsive design of websites. For new and less experienced designers often the ready in hand templates with several responsive elements built in, can allow great ease of designing for a multitude of devices. Templates also help them to master the skills and tricks of responsive design.

10. Test your design across devices

Finally, your design is not validated of its responsive quality without being tested. To ensure it displays the way you always wished it to be, either you need to test the design across as many devices as possible or simply depend on emulators for the result. There is an array of mobile emulators that allows simulating a mobile experience for different devices but nothing comes as effective as testing it across real device screens of various brands.

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